$339 Billion Deeper in Debt

Now that former House Speaker John Boehner’s deal with President Obama to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until March 2017 is law, the U.S. Treasury Department is ending the shell game that it was playing with the nation’s accounts and trust funds to keep the government running as if it were business as usual.

For the U.S. national debt, that means that a very sudden $339 billion upward adjustment. Pete Kasperowicz of the Washington Examinerreports:

The U.S. national debt jumped $339 billion on Monday, the same day President Obama signed into law legislation suspending the debt ceiling.

That legislation allowed the government to borrow as much as it wants above the $18.1 trillion debt ceiling that had been in place.

The website that reports the exact tally of the debt said the U.S. government owed $18.153 trillion last Friday, and said that number surged to $18.492 on Monday.

With the nation’s statutury debt limit suspended until March 2017, U.S. politicians and bureaucrats will effectively have no credit limit until that time – if there’s money they want to authorize themselves to spend, they can spend it without constraint, ignoring the actual debt ceiling that is actually written into the law.

Somehow, we don’t think that any major credit card company would ever offer such a generous credit program to regular Americans.

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